This is the Link Report for September 28th through September 29th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• Google Wave Invites: How To Get Them – The web is buzzing with excitement and anticipation. In less than 24 hours, Google Wave will launch to 100,000 early adopters. The real-time communication platform has been making headlines ever since it was announced back in May as a result of its potentially game-changing features.
• Create Your Own Building for the Biggest Monopoly Game Ever – Play Monopoly using Google Maps! Neato!
• Dropbox Meets The iPhone; Access Files On The Go – Dropbox, the easy to use file access manager which syncs your files across all your computers and the web, has introduced an iPhone application to make it even easier to access your files anywhere in the world. After almost 7 weeks of waiting, Apple has finally approved the application. With this new iPhone app, users will get access to all their Dropbox documents, PDF’s, pictures, videos and much more. Dropbox also introduced offline viewing in the iPhone app, with “Favorites.” If you add a file to your ‘Favorites’, they’ll be accessible at any time. To do so, just hit the star at the bottom of any file, and it’ll be added. Otherwise, your files stay in the cloud.
• Sean Parker Joins Yammer’s Board Of Directors – Sean Parker is no stranger to Internet success. He’s 28 years old and has already helped start four very well-known services on the web: Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and of course, Facebook. And now he’s taking his impressive resume to Yammer, where he is joining the enterprise microblogging service’s Board of Directors.
• FCC’s Broadband Plan: A Need for (Actual) Speed – U.S. broadband policy must take into account real network speeds, which lag advertised speeds by at least 50 percent, according to the FCC task force charged with helping to develop a national broadband plan. But just how policy should address the differences between the two is far from clear.
• Metered Broadband Is the Future: Verizon CTO – Verizon Chief Technology Officer Dick Lynch said today that in the coming years, wired broadband will likely be sold in packages based on the amount of data a person wants to consume, much like wireless broadband is sold today. In comments made to press at the 2009 Fiber to the Home Conference Expo in Houston, Lynch stressed that he wasn’t announcing a shift in pricing for Verizon, but that: “We’re going to have to consider pricing structures that allow us to sell packages of bytes, and at the end of the day the concept of a flat-rate infinitely expandable service is unachievable.”
• STUDY: 80% of Twitter Users Are All About Me – Rutgers University Professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase set out to analyze the content and characteristics of social media activity. They dubbed communications systems like Facebook and Twitter, “social awareness streams,” and then took to examining user behavior.
• SEOmoz | Design Trends: The Single Purpose Homepage – This post focuses on a design style that's both retro (it's been around a long time) and emerging (the popularity, at least to me, feels like it's on the rise) – the single-purpose homepage.
• Twitter Tips to Help Brands Stay Authentic and Transparent – Online Marketing Blog – Any marketer who’s successfully made the move to social media will tell you the rules of traditional marketing have to be reexamined. That’s particularly true with Twitter, where brands have just 140 characters to inform, evoke emotion and inspire action. One of the most basic and critical rules for brands on Twitter? Be authentic and transparent in all you do.
• Five Search Marketing Tips For The Holidays – What is unique for holiday season 2009 are the specific strategies online retailers must take this year to reap the most sales possible. With lessons learned from last year’s bloated inventories and fire-sale prices, many retailers this year are restricting inventories and fine-tuning merchandising in an attempt to lure shoppers to purchase earlier and at higher prices. And, of course, the best way to get potential shoppers to your site is via search engine marketing. 82% of holiday shoppers polled by Google said they find search engines “extremely or very useful” in making their purchases.

On March 24th, David Sarno in his LA Times article “There’s Twitter the companym and Twitter the Medium” highlights some important concerns with the relatively new and booming microblogging service. Technology celebrities like Leo Laporte and Dave Winer have both addressed the need and appeal of Twitter as well as their concern about the closed, non-transparent nature of the company that runs it.

“They kind of have you,” said Laporte, who now has more than 100,000 followers on the service. “The same way that Facebook has you: because you have to go where the community is.”

Still, being in thrall to Twitter hasn’t stopped Laporte from joining a conversation that’s taking hold on the service’s fringes. As this group of Web subversives sees it, the once-tiny Twitter has grown like a magic beanstalk into a full-fledged communications medium — taking its place alongside Web pages, e-mail and maybe even television. And though the 30-person, San Francisco start-up is not exactly General Electric, digital trust-busters believe the same rules apply: One company shouldn’t have a monopoly…

…on an entire medium — even if it invented it.

“Those of us who are participating are pumping value into this closed system and trusting that Twitter will do the right thing with it,” said Laporte, referring to the tweets users pour into Twitter’s databases every day by the million.

People love the convenience and reach of social media systems like Twitter, he said.  “But what they ignore is that there’s a dark side to all of that, which is that these companies have a huge amount of control over what’s going on.”

With this concern comes new innovation, open source ventures like Laconi.ca and it’s initial install Identi.ca have spawned Twitter-clones for those who want to break from the mold and grasp of the extremely commercial Twitter.

Now with these other incarnations of Twitter comes one inherent issue… lack of communication between the original and those clones. Unlike other popular clones (IBM-compatible computers and the new Hackintosh) these Laconi.ca installations talk to one another but don’t exactly communicate with the original. On Identi.ca you can send your posts from that service to your Twitter account but you can’t set it so that your Tweets on Twitter go to you Identi.ca and other Laconica installed programs.

Another issue that I see that is hindering the growth of Twitter-clones is the lack of connection and polarization. On Twitter, “everyone” is there. People from Laporte and Winer to Kevin Rose, Shaq and others. Twitter is the “IT” place to be right now. At almost ever tech event the biggest thing in the tech community (in the Valley and beyond) is your Twitter identity. People wear their @twitternames on name tags like badges of honor and look to connect with everyone they meet on a more interactive and social level. Tweetups have spawned and become a new word in our vernacular and have extended “Social Media” beyond the desk, keyboard and mouse to local pubs and meeting places.

With this in mind, the idea that one, yes one, company is the gate keeper of all this exchanging of ideas and clearly (rightfully so) is capitalizing on it is a bit worrisome. When Twitter goes down or launches a Fail Wale, that iconic image that emerges from the depths of the Twitter  ocean every time the service has a hiccup, the community is held hostage. This is a concern, with this new era of transparency, in Washington and online Twitter is an ivory castle with big thick-doors keeping peering eyes from peaking in.

The only way that Twitter as a medium can grow and truly be a medium for the people is to intertwine itself or have the clones intertwine themselves together for cross pollination between the different Twitter-like services.

What are your thoughts on this? Are you concerned? What do you think should be done to open up the system? Post your thoughts below.